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By Root 1194 0

the more commodious and comfortable lodgings which they had previously envied from a distance; the slaves who flocked into the towns from the outlying plantations, seeking the protection of Federal authority and a more congenial atmosphere in which to spend their first days of freedom, found an instant answer to their housing problem by occupying the elegant town houses of absent owners. To sleep in the master’s bed and eat at the dining-room table with the family silver and china was a novel and exhilarating experience. “Mamma’s house is occupied by freedmen, cooking in every room,” reported a South Carolina woman who had only recently heard from a friend in a nearby town that “all the houses around them are occupied by negroes.” Already in shock over the apparent collapse of the social order, native whites now listened to reports that slaves were using the baronial town houses to give “Negro balls” and dinner parties. “The whites [presumably Yankees] and blacks danced together,” a friend wrote Adele Allston of a recent “ball” in Georgetown, South Carolina.74

Where would it all end? The events of the past several weeks, Henry W. Ravenel confided to his diary, reminded him of the horrors of the French Revolution. “White man is nigger—and nigger is white man” was the way another South Carolinian chose to describe “the state of things.” Whether in the towns or in the countryside, the welcome accorded the Union troops by many slaves had not been confined to prayers and singing but had included as well the expropriation of nearly everything belonging to their masters and mistresses that could be moved. With a feeling of utter helplessness, Amanda Stone’s family, after abandoning the family home in Louisiana, heard how the slaves had quarreled over the division of clothes and how the house had been stripped of furniture, carpets, books, the piano, “and everything else.” Nor did the presence of the white family necessarily restrain the slaves. “The Negroes as soon as they heard the guns,” a rice planter in South Carolina reported, “rushed to my house and pillaged it of many things and principally wearing apparel”; he felt certain that the entire affair had been “pre-arranged.”75

For the masters, what proved most difficult to accept was the gratification some slaves derived from these attacks on property. “Many of them,” John H. Bills thought, “do all they can to have us destroyed & delight in seeing the work of destruction.” Upon returning to their plantation home, the Allston family suddenly understood the overseer’s report that their slaves had “behaved Verry badly.”

We looked at the house; it was a wreck,—the front steps gone, not a door nor shutter left, and not a sash. They had torn out all the mahogany framework around the doors and windows—there were mahogany panels below the windows and above the doors there were panels painted—the mahogany banisters to the staircase going upstairs; everything that could be torn away was gone.… It was a scene of destruction, and papa’s study, where he kept all his accounts and papers, as he had done from the time he began planting as a young man, was almost waistdeep in torn letters and papers.76

The systematic nature of much of the black pillaging suggests that it was frequently neither indiscriminate nor simply a matter of gratified revenge but rather an opportunity to supplement their meager diets and wardrobes and improve their standard of living. Why they killed the livestock, emptied the meat houses and storerooms, and expropriated the liquors and wines would seem sufficiently obvious. The furniture and materials removed from the Big House were often used to make their own cabins more habitable. One South Carolina slave explained that after the master departed, they stripped boards from his house in order to floor their own cabins and put in lofts. Similarly, when the slaves broke into closets, bureaus, trunks, and desks, ripped open the bedding, or scattered the master’s private papers, they were frequently seeking money, jewelry, or silverware that might be traded for needed